Best Performer - who won?
Board-walking brilliance comes in many forms: on stage, screen or street; for dancing, reciting, moving, shaking. Who made you laugh, cry, howl, quake?
It’s a tough gig, being cast opposite Cate Blanchett (particularly when you split her head open with a bung chuck of a radio one night) and following in the footfalls of the role that made Marlon Brando “the greatest actor of his generation”, but Blacktown boy Joel Edgerton nailed Stanley Kowalski with his vile, visceral, virile and commanding, yet curiously ego-free, bravura performance.
Yael Stone – Frankenstein/ Lady Bird / Elling
Having won last year’s Sydney Theatre Award for Best Newcomer and Best Supporting Actress, Yael Stone has used 2009 to prove why. Stone explores characters with incredible depth and a diversity of emotions. An actor across all mediums (film and All Saints on TV are also part of her canon), Yael’s class and confidence on stage translate into moving, entertaining, affecting performance.
As Richard II and Lady Anne in War of the Roses, Cate was mesmerising. As Rick 3, she had with a near 2 hour long quasi-soliloquy on her divine right as King. As grieving widow Anne her performances was a stratospheric highlight of a theatre masterpiece. In Streetcar, Cate’s Blanche DuBois was simultaneously outlandish, sensuous and controlled, endowed with the complexity this classic character required. In 2009 our Cate took the local stage for the first time since 2004 – may she never leave it!
Last time we checked YouTube vlogger Natalie Tran’s communitychannel had 435,200 subscribers! That made it the most subscribed YouTube user in Australia, and just outside the World Top 20! Possessing a Seinfeld strain of humour, Natalie files every couple of days by posting a clip to YouTube where she muses on the mundane moments of life. Not only is she a clever performer, but Ms Tran has also created a niche for herself in the world of internet reality.
Mitchell Butel’s performance in the musical comedy Avenue Q should be lauded on several levels, both for his mastery of puppetry and also for his physicality as naïve-college graduate Princeton/ closeted Republican Rod. In playing two roles simultaneously, Mitchell did the impossible and made his invisibility an artform.
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